


The Secret Keeper

by Ghostie



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 07:26:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostie/pseuds/Ghostie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aletia fell into the habit of collecting secrets at the tender age of six.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Secret Keeper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WildAndFreeHearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildAndFreeHearts/gifts).



Aletia fell into the habit of collecting secrets at the tender age of six.

Though this was not unheard of, it must be said that the response from her family and friends was not altogether positive.

Her mother’s people, selkies from the southern waters with oily skins and shifting faces, had hoped she would take after them and gather slippery promises in her pockets. Her father’s family, seraphim from the wind-bit wastes to the north, had been sure she would itch for prayers, paper-thin and chalky on the roof of her mouth. And Klaus, the one-eyed djinn who had been named little Aletia’s god-father because everyone was too afraid to refuse him when he’d inquired about the position, had hoped in his heart of hearts that the child would have an affinity for curses, for the twists of sullen fire had warmed his hands through many cold winter nights over the past two centuries.

Aletia, on the other hand, seemed quite content to ignore any displeasure and went about her business as she always had, the shadowed strands of riddles braided around her wrists and ankles doing nothing to slow her down.

It was a curious sight, the neighbors all muttered, and not entirely proper. Amor, who was a first rate succubus, a proud collector of lies, and the girl’s neighbor, took it upon herself to do something about it one day and stopped Aletia on the way to school. “What _have_ you got there?” she asked, reaching for a sluice of shadow resting on the child’s neck.

The secret slipped behind the girl’s ears; Amor could see it fluttering against the hairs on the back of her neck. She pursed her lips. “A secret is only powerful when it’s not used, you know. You can’t look at it. You can’t know what it is or it will go away.”

Looking up at Amor with a vaguely disinterested expression, Aletia cocked her head and blinked slowly.

Amor sighed and tried again. “You should collect something else, is what I mean.”

Aletia regarded her for a moment before turning to continue down the sidewalk, her too-big cardigan trailing behind her while the secrets slipped back onto her wrists, forming bangles that bobbed and bounced as she walked.

Amor muttered something about youths and returned to her tower, conveniently forgetting that in her own heyday she had experimented with all manner of avant-garde notions.

And so everyone, one by one, slowly stopped bothering Aletia about her skeins of secrets. And the years passed.

***

When the Blight came it came steadily. It was no lynx leaping from the shadows to rip out the necks of its prey; it was no bolt of lightning leaping down from a sudden cloudburst.

The Blight was water dripping on stone, moss growing over tree roots. By the time it was big enough to notice, nothing could be done.

But what was there to do but try?

The selkies arrived first, throwing all their pocketfuls of promises at the encroaching doom. But though promises shine brighter than fire opals and softer than pearls they are dreadfully oily, and one by one they slipped and skated off of the Blight, leaving it utterly unmoved by their efforts.

The seraphim came next, their six wings blazing brands against the sky. The spat prayers down on the Blight until their lips cracked and bled from the heat. A seraph’s prayer, incubated over thousands of years, is no laughing matter. And some did manage to pierce the hide of the Blight, and a great cheer rang out from the watching crowd. But alas, prayers are brittle and quick to break; for every one that pierced the Blight a baker’s dozen shattered into scattered oaths across the ground.

One by one all tried their hand but nothing seemed to have any effect, and it was with sinking dread that everyone realized that there was no one left to stand in its way.

Except, of course, for Aletia.

She stood in the shadow of the colossus, staring up at it with a face like calm water. She seemed to all around her unbearably slight; she was only fourteen, and still small for her age. She looked for all intents like a leaf on the lip of a maelstrom or a pebble on the edge of a cliff.

It came as no surprise then, that the first secret she threw had absolutely no effect, nor the second, nor the third. The shadows were dashed against the ground like errant raindrops, and the Blight continued on, heedless and menacing in its enormity. Amor cried out and tucked her head against Klaus’s chest, unable to watch. After all, how could a shadow stand up to something so substantial? Something so _real_?

Aletia seemed to realize this a half-beat after everyone else had. Her eyes, until now so calm and steady, flashed back and forth like cornered deer. Her hands began to tremble. Her foot began to beat out a nervous staccato in the dirt.

The crowd waited for her to run, holding their breath hostage against their own fear.

Aletia did not run.

She took a deep breath and raised her hands- and let all the secrets fall away from her. There were dozens of them, hundreds even, a flock of dark feathers scattering into the air like shed wings. When she lowered her hands her neck was bare, her wrists and ankles were unadorned.

There was one secret that remained, a little shadow hidden twist of smoke and light that clung to her like a second skin. She inhaled and exhaled and cradled it against her heart as the sun began to rise up over the crowns of the hills in the distance.

The greatest secret, after all, is always one’s own.

It’s said that secrets are only valuable in the keeping. They are strong when they abide, like the foundations of a castle, in the dark hidden spaces of the mind.

This is not a lie. Nor is it the truth.

Because secrets are also powerful in the telling, in the exultation, the moment when they burst from the lips of the speaker and become no longer secrets but solid and real. Spoken secrets are moths that burn like a million candles before they go up in wisps of smoke. Spoken secrets are the colors that light up the sky in the moment the sun falls behind the dark hills on the horizon. Spoken secrets are the ecstasy that shrieks up through your veins when you fall from a high place and think, for just a moment, that you might miss the ground.

Secrets are more powerful than anything else when they are becoming truth.

Aletia tugged the secret from her chest and tasted it one last time, the eddies and currents of it like honey on her teeth.

And then she drew it up so she could look deep into it and see what hid there, waiting all this time. Waiting for her. And then she spoke it.

And it wasn’t a secret anymore, she felt it curling up like burning paper in her hands, dying, bleeding out but it didn’t matter because now it was real and so was she and there was such unbearable light and the air was like vodka in her lungs and it _hurt (the truth always hurts, always always)_ -

And the blight was falling away into nothingness before her.

***

Amor was the first one to come up to her, the succubus’s eyes blinking rapidly against the brilliant dawn light.

She surveyed the scorched earth around her and the blasted crater before her: the only traces of the Blight left, other than the dark memories in her head. “I suppose it’s okay,” she said faintly. “If you collect secrets, that is.”

Absentmindedly brushing ash from her hands, Aletia turned to face her. “I think perhaps I'm done collecting secrets, actually."

And then she grinned. “Tell me, have you ever heard of anyone collecting truths?”

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!


End file.
